Cucina Vera dumped

Sydney may boast about its culinary edge but the city was slighted when Channel Seven's reality television show, My Restaurant Rules, claimed its first scalp at the weekend.

DIY restaurateurs Sam and Catherine Sgambellone were the first team to be evicted after their Crown Street restaurant, Cucina Vera, lost the public vote to Ash Huish and Amanda Thomas's Perth restaurant, Room Nineteen.

The brother-and-sister team from Sans Souci and their 15staff had just minutes to close up shop when the result was announced at 9.30pm on Saturday. The show was screened last night.

"It's on the verge of being too real, this television," Mr Sgambellone said yesterday, after a late night out on the town with family and friends following the eviction.

"We must have nearly killed ourselves to achieve what we have achieved there - and then to have to get out of there in 15minutes was really hard to come to terms with."

Five teams - from Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane - had to set up and run a restaurant on a tight budget.

Last week a Melbourne restaurant reviewer, Matt Preston, assessed each restaurant, and Perth and Sydney were ranked as the worst. It was then left to the viewers.

But Mr Sgambellone disputed the review, saying it was "dramatically different" from the feedback he had received from customers.

"I don't think we deserved to be in the bottom two restaurants," he said.

Mr Sgambellone - the son of the founder of the failed Cut Price Deli chain, Enzo Sgambellone - described the experience of reality television as "pretty horrible", with the long hours usually expected in the hospitality industry compounded by the demands of television.

"The bit we enjoyed was the restaurant, not the cameras," he said. "We were sort of fighting the production team from day one."

The siblings have the $25,000 profit to take home, but Mr Sgambellone said they would not raise more money to buy back Cucina Vera.

"It would feel wrong buying back something that felt like ours in the first place," he said.